Oriental men? Who still uses the term oriental these days? You mean Asian men. That's like using the term negro.
Anyway, Bug would be interesting -- only limited by one's imagination, I suppose. I can think of lots of things once the teleporter module is released. ;-)
Unless your roads are a lot smoother than any I've ever ridden on you'll find that any helmet cam quickly become lurch'n'lose your lunch cam when you try and watch it later. The Oregon Scientific ATC2000 (http://www.atc2k.com) does some of what you want, at least it mounts on the helmet and records to memory card. In my experience the sound recording is woeful or inaudible and you can only use it during daylight. The handle-bar mount seems to give less puke-inducing footage than the helmet mount, but maybe that's just my roads.
Charlie Gower
· 2 years ago
Bug Labs - nice. I had been wondering.
Everyone has a little dream project they would like to have created for them. I'm playing with some AGPS stuff at the moment and just the idea of localised weather according to your exact position is very intriguing - telling you which blocks to turn on to avoid the rain cloud. Slick.
Who wouldn't want that?
Charlie Gower
· 2 years ago
Bug Labs - nice. I had been wondering.
Everyone has a little dream project they would like to have created for them. I'm playing with some AGPS stuff at the moment and just the idea of localised weather according to your exact position is very intriguing - telling you which blocks to turn on to avoid the rain cloud. Slick.
Who wouldn't want that?
s
· 2 years ago
I eat sleep and breathe embedded, and have for many years. I can tell you there have been numerous companies that attempted to become the "Digi-Key" of modules and the issue isn't the computing platform. It's always the I/O, and then the PS. Rarely is the computing platform an issue. Anytime someone wanted some electronics that did this or that, the challenge was the I/O, and then the PS.
The most common approach over the years has been to create a module that could be attached to a desktop platform. Interfacing with the PC has been done through any of the serial ports, but again, it always came down to the I/O (transducers, displays, etc) and the PS. Someone had an idea for an automotive system they wanted to try out cheap, then there was a home weather station that could throw local readings onto a TV channel, phone gadgets, USB phones and Ethernet door bells, ZigBee mail delivery sensors that work at minus 20, you name it - I've built it. Sometimes for free.
The micro and software was often the easiest part. I did all this with a couple guys for sometime, but WE didn't have any money.
So, my point is that, to come up to bat concentrating on the computing platform which already exists in countless shapes and sizes and dirt cheap, seems a little like picking out dishes for a house that hasn't even been built, yet. Modularizing all the I/O and PS so anyone can do about anything they want, is the crux.
Now, there are companies that do that, too. But they're expensive. A few hundred dollars for this, and a few hundred dollars for that, etc. AND, there are often "gotchas" hooking it up the way you want.
Thanks for allowing me to post my two cents at lunch today. You can always delete it if you want ;-)
vruz
· 2 years ago
I do want Bugs indeed.
I do want the IBM-PC of mobile devices.
You're sitting on a new industry.
Brad Burnham
· 2 years ago
I want to apologize to anyone who was offended by my use of the term oriental to describe the men I saw ironing in a laundry in Brooklyn. I suspect the term came to mind because the scene I described took place 25 years ago, and the men involved were well into middle age. The term may not have been as inappropriate a description of those men at that time as it is today.
I would also like to make clear that I was very impressed by their skill, so much so that I stood outside a screen door staring completely enthralled for a good ten minutes. I am also inspired by anyone who has the courage and determination to move halfway across the world in search of a better life. The use of the term oriental was in no way meant to imply that I was anything but impressed with these men.
I am saddened to realize that someone who does not know me could have interpreted it otherwise. I have changed the language in the post but have posted this comment so as not to confuse folks about the earlier comments.
Tom Nixon
· 2 years ago
Brad, I think you've made an incredible investment in Bug Labs. The more I think about this concept of The Long Tail of hardware and gadgets, the more I love it. The fact that it's all completely open makes the whole thing just fall into place in my mind. I for one will be watching this company and its products develop with great interest. Best of luck!
Tom
Jeffrey Ricker
· 2 years ago
Congratulations on getting Bug Labs to the next step. I am impressed by the steady progress that they have made over the past 12 months. The embedded wireless Internet and service oriented device architecture are set to explode. Bug Labs appears to be in an excellent position to fuel that explosion and prosper.
Andrius Kulikauskas
· 2 years ago
Brad, I'm very glad to learn of Bug Labs through Jerry Michalski and also find your post. I have come to a similar conclusion as Bug Labs and a similar interest in inclusion, but from a particular need that our Minciu Sodas lab has. We serve and organize independent thinkers around the world and are very strong in Africa. We have participants who walk 5 km and pay $1 an hour to engage us at Internet cafes. We would like them to be able to work offline but they may not have electricity at home. So we are realizing it shouldn't be hard to build a device for reading and editing text files (like emails) from USB flash drives and also supporting an offline file sharing network as well as an online system for optimizing the download and upload of files for participating in online community. This leads to a simple device http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?FlashDriveEditor with a simple monochrome screen that could be the hub for all kinds of additional hardware modules (for sound, wi-fi, etc.) It would use a standard computer keyboard and AA batteries. Existing word processors like AlphaSmart, QuickPad, TheWriter are able to work for up to 700 hours on such batteries and they sell for $200 to $350. I believe that such a device as I describe can ultimately be available for 30 USD but I believe that there is already a market for it even at $300 because it is superior to a laptop because it doesn't need an electric grid, it uses standard parts (like flash drives, keyboard, batteries) that can be replaced or upgraded as needed, it doesn't need an adapter (which is easy to break and difficult to replace), it is much simpler to use than a computer and less distracting and without viruses, it is much easier to share the parts, it is basically a 1980s word processor optimized for today's Africans and with the BugLabs mindset for architecture. We're working on this at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mendenyo/ and trying to find $25,000 to do 20 hardware experiments (how might this work with TVs, old computer monitors, different display technologies) to develop a prototype and then $125,000 to do a run of 200 of that prototype and work for a friendly customer (say the Peace Corps or World Space). Our goal is to allow anybody to participate in our lab's email working groups http://www.ms.lt and also in the knowledge work economy. We have workers in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, India, Serbia, Lithuania, more than 100 active participants and 1,000 supportive participants. I hope to learn more about the BUGbase because that might serve as the heart of our system and then we'd add a simple display for work with the flash drives. It would be great to join the BugLabs community and I appreciate your and their help to think through and work out a way for our lab and network to be able to earn money as we work to create such a device and future devices and apply them for work locally and globally. For example, the device might catalyze the roll out of local wireless networks which depends on access to a lot of knowledge and technical support. The wi-fi capabilities of BUGbase all the more so allow for local wireless networks which I believe are more relevant than even linking up with the global Internet (more business is local than global) but will certainly lead to that link. Please write and I hope we might speak some time! We would very much like to participate in the BugLabs vision.
Azam Khan
· 2 years ago
I want my mobile phone, when I walk in to a social area, to tell me who else has similar likes as me etc. Then that will allow me to better narrow down a list of females I may like to approach. After a conversation or so(something that can never be substituted for) and deciding if I want to ask her out, I could direct her to a place with less noise so she could hear me better. My system would talk to her system and based on our schedule and say restaurants we both like, I could place my mobile down and project a video forecasting what the date would be like. 2 avatars, one with my picture and one with hers would play on the projected screen with us visiting the restaurant and doing anything else I have programmed for it to do after. To actually show what a date would be like could revolutionize dating. Oh and I wouldn't mind people to have dating credit scores somehow..
s
· 2 years ago
Yeah, then maybe it'll read your brain waves and compose the optimal conversation you conduct which optimizes her receptiveness and which is further conducive to optimizing her alpha waves and subsequently presents you with directions to the nearest theatre where the optimal movie is showing.
Get real.
Roberto Catalan
· 2 years ago
Please, I am 'oriental', but I am not the least bit offended by Brad's choice of words because the context was clearly benign.
The market already offers a wide variety of powerful, portable devices whose functionality is (or can be) extensible (voice recognition, video, accelerometers, etc.) via USB.
Regardless of brand of hand-held or wearable computing hardware (and the selection of add-on devices), the REAL capabilities and processing power will still reside on the Net, not in these portable devices.
The key then is to enable a truly ubiquitous intelligent infrastructure worldwide, and there is a way to get this done.
Amit Patel
· 2 years ago
You're not the only one who wants things like this. Not only do I want the specific camera you have (except I want one on my glasses), I want lots of other things that “should” be easy except the devices aren't open enough to communicate. For example I want my GPS and my camera to talk to each other. I want my computer to look up the weather forecast and adjust the sprinkler settings. I want my car's computer, which can show me mpg, time driven, miles, etc., to send all that information to a spreadsheet on my laptop. I have all these devices and I could get more out of them if I could get them to work together.
Firebrand
· 2 years ago
I don't care about color, I don't care about having a camera, I don't even care if it's too large to put into my pocket. All I care about is having a PDA-phone that's as good as my ancient Handspring Visorphone.
What's so good about the Visorphone? It's a well-documented general-purpose computing platform that happens to also handle phone calls. You can write programs for it using free, open-source tools, which lowers barriers to entry, and therefore there is a rich selection of software for it, a lot of it free.
Another nice thing about the Visor is being able to input data one-handed using a stylus. It's so much faster than having to push the same button multiple times to toggle through all the possible letters on a 4x3 number pad, or a tiny QWERTY keyboard.
The thing I thought would be useful but hasn't been was the Springboard slot. I never ended up plugging anything in there except the phone. Now, some modules look vaguely useful, but until I can have them *and* a phone active at the same time, I'm not really interested.
Now the venerable Visors are becoming scarcer and scarcer on eBay each time I break one and have to buy a replacement. I'm expecting that I'll have to migrate to something else soon. Between your guys, OpenMoko, or some non-vaporware GreenPhone implementation, I will buy whichever one a) actually works reliably as a phone b) has the most support from third-party developers, especially open source ones and c) has a touch screen sensitive enough for handwriting recognition.
That being said, if the gadget meets the above three deal-breaker criteria, the following would be good bonus features:
* Audio recorder and player
* Media reader
* USB external drive
* Bluetooth
* GPS
* Camera
...in pretty much that order.
Chris
· 2 years ago
Brad --
OK, this might not be *everything* you want, but it's close for now: the VholdR from Twenty20. [I have nothing to do with these guys ... I have, however, seen an operating version at a recent trade show.] Check out http://www.vholdr.com/features.php and esp. the On/Off/Repeat feature which allows you to set a loop time and then, with a push of a button, save a given loop (up to 2 GB) and then continue with your taping ... pretty nifty way to collect "the good stuff" whilst leaving out the garden-variety endos and such. Not auto-download ... sorry. ;-)
All Comments
I want a beta SDK :-)
Oriental men? Who still uses the term oriental these days? You mean Asian men. That's like using the term negro.
Anyway, Bug would be interesting -- only limited by one's imagination, I suppose. I can think of lots of things once the teleporter module is released. ;-)
Oriental men?!? Do you know that you are using an offensive term? Check: http://www.answers.com/oriental
Unless your roads are a lot smoother than any I've ever ridden on you'll find that any helmet cam quickly become lurch'n'lose your lunch cam when you try and watch it later. The Oregon Scientific ATC2000 (http://www.atc2k.com) does some of what you want, at least it mounts on the helmet and records to memory card. In my experience the sound recording is woeful or inaudible and you can only use it during daylight. The handle-bar mount seems to give less puke-inducing footage than the helmet mount, but maybe that's just my roads.
Bug Labs - nice. I had been wondering.
Everyone has a little dream project they would like to have created for them. I'm playing with some AGPS stuff at the moment and just the idea of localised weather according to your exact position is very intriguing - telling you which blocks to turn on to avoid the rain cloud. Slick.
Who wouldn't want that?
Bug Labs - nice. I had been wondering.
Everyone has a little dream project they would like to have created for them. I'm playing with some AGPS stuff at the moment and just the idea of localised weather according to your exact position is very intriguing - telling you which blocks to turn on to avoid the rain cloud. Slick.
Who wouldn't want that?
I eat sleep and breathe embedded, and have for many years. I can tell you there have been numerous companies that attempted to become the "Digi-Key" of modules and the issue isn't the computing platform. It's always the I/O, and then the PS. Rarely is the computing platform an issue. Anytime someone wanted some electronics that did this or that, the challenge was the I/O, and then the PS.
The most common approach over the years has been to create a module that could be attached to a desktop platform. Interfacing with the PC has been done through any of the serial ports, but again, it always came down to the I/O (transducers, displays, etc) and the PS. Someone had an idea for an automotive system they wanted to try out cheap, then there was a home weather station that could throw local readings onto a TV channel, phone gadgets, USB phones and Ethernet door bells, ZigBee mail delivery sensors that work at minus 20, you name it - I've built it. Sometimes for free.
The micro and software was often the easiest part. I did all this with a couple guys for sometime, but WE didn't have any money.
So, my point is that, to come up to bat concentrating on the computing platform which already exists in countless shapes and sizes and dirt cheap, seems a little like picking out dishes for a house that hasn't even been built, yet. Modularizing all the I/O and PS so anyone can do about anything they want, is the crux.
Now, there are companies that do that, too. But they're expensive. A few hundred dollars for this, and a few hundred dollars for that, etc. AND, there are often "gotchas" hooking it up the way you want.
Thanks for allowing me to post my two cents at lunch today. You can always delete it if you want ;-)
I do want Bugs indeed.
I do want the IBM-PC of mobile devices.
You're sitting on a new industry.
I want to apologize to anyone who was offended by my use of the term oriental to describe the men I saw ironing in a laundry in Brooklyn. I suspect the term came to mind because the scene I described took place 25 years ago, and the men involved were well into middle age. The term may not have been as inappropriate a description of those men at that time as it is today.
I would also like to make clear that I was very impressed by their skill, so much so that I stood outside a screen door staring completely enthralled for a good ten minutes. I am also inspired by anyone who has the courage and determination to move halfway across the world in search of a better life. The use of the term oriental was in no way meant to imply that I was anything but impressed with these men.
I am saddened to realize that someone who does not know me could have interpreted it otherwise. I have changed the language in the post but have posted this comment so as not to confuse folks about the earlier comments.
Brad, I think you've made an incredible investment in Bug Labs. The more I think about this concept of The Long Tail of hardware and gadgets, the more I love it. The fact that it's all completely open makes the whole thing just fall into place in my mind. I for one will be watching this company and its products develop with great interest. Best of luck!
Tom
Congratulations on getting Bug Labs to the next step. I am impressed by the steady progress that they have made over the past 12 months. The embedded wireless Internet and service oriented device architecture are set to explode. Bug Labs appears to be in an excellent position to fuel that explosion and prosper.
Brad, I'm very glad to learn of Bug Labs through Jerry Michalski and also find your post. I have come to a similar conclusion as Bug Labs and a similar interest in inclusion, but from a particular need that our Minciu Sodas lab has. We serve and organize independent thinkers around the world and are very strong in Africa. We have participants who walk 5 km and pay $1 an hour to engage us at Internet cafes. We would like them to be able to work offline but they may not have electricity at home. So we are realizing it shouldn't be hard to build a device for reading and editing text files (like emails) from USB flash drives and also supporting an offline file sharing network as well as an online system for optimizing the download and upload of files for participating in online community. This leads to a simple device http://www.worknets.org/wiki.cgi?FlashDriveEditor with a simple monochrome screen that could be the hub for all kinds of additional hardware modules (for sound, wi-fi, etc.) It would use a standard computer keyboard and AA batteries. Existing word processors like AlphaSmart, QuickPad, TheWriter are able to work for up to 700 hours on such batteries and they sell for $200 to $350. I believe that such a device as I describe can ultimately be available for 30 USD but I believe that there is already a market for it even at $300 because it is superior to a laptop because it doesn't need an electric grid, it uses standard parts (like flash drives, keyboard, batteries) that can be replaced or upgraded as needed, it doesn't need an adapter (which is easy to break and difficult to replace), it is much simpler to use than a computer and less distracting and without viruses, it is much easier to share the parts, it is basically a 1980s word processor optimized for today's Africans and with the BugLabs mindset for architecture. We're working on this at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mendenyo/ and trying to find $25,000 to do 20 hardware experiments (how might this work with TVs, old computer monitors, different display technologies) to develop a prototype and then $125,000 to do a run of 200 of that prototype and work for a friendly customer (say the Peace Corps or World Space). Our goal is to allow anybody to participate in our lab's email working groups http://www.ms.lt and also in the knowledge work economy. We have workers in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, India, Serbia, Lithuania, more than 100 active participants and 1,000 supportive participants. I hope to learn more about the BUGbase because that might serve as the heart of our system and then we'd add a simple display for work with the flash drives. It would be great to join the BugLabs community and I appreciate your and their help to think through and work out a way for our lab and network to be able to earn money as we work to create such a device and future devices and apply them for work locally and globally. For example, the device might catalyze the roll out of local wireless networks which depends on access to a lot of knowledge and technical support. The wi-fi capabilities of BUGbase all the more so allow for local wireless networks which I believe are more relevant than even linking up with the global Internet (more business is local than global) but will certainly lead to that link. Please write and I hope we might speak some time! We would very much like to participate in the BugLabs vision.
I want my mobile phone, when I walk in to a social area, to tell me who else has similar likes as me etc. Then that will allow me to better narrow down a list of females I may like to approach. After a conversation or so(something that can never be substituted for) and deciding if I want to ask her out, I could direct her to a place with less noise so she could hear me better. My system would talk to her system and based on our schedule and say restaurants we both like, I could place my mobile down and project a video forecasting what the date would be like. 2 avatars, one with my picture and one with hers would play on the projected screen with us visiting the restaurant and doing anything else I have programmed for it to do after. To actually show what a date would be like could revolutionize dating. Oh and I wouldn't mind people to have dating credit scores somehow..
Yeah, then maybe it'll read your brain waves and compose the optimal conversation you conduct which optimizes her receptiveness and which is further conducive to optimizing her alpha waves and subsequently presents you with directions to the nearest theatre where the optimal movie is showing.
Get real.
Please, I am 'oriental', but I am not the least bit offended by Brad's choice of words because the context was clearly benign.
The market already offers a wide variety of powerful, portable devices whose functionality is (or can be) extensible (voice recognition, video, accelerometers, etc.) via USB.
Regardless of brand of hand-held or wearable computing hardware (and the selection of add-on devices), the REAL capabilities and processing power will still reside on the Net, not in these portable devices.
The key then is to enable a truly ubiquitous intelligent infrastructure worldwide, and there is a way to get this done.
You're not the only one who wants things like this. Not only do I want the specific camera you have (except I want one on my glasses), I want lots of other things that “should” be easy except the devices aren't open enough to communicate. For example I want my GPS and my camera to talk to each other. I want my computer to look up the weather forecast and adjust the sprinkler settings. I want my car's computer, which can show me mpg, time driven, miles, etc., to send all that information to a spreadsheet on my laptop. I have all these devices and I could get more out of them if I could get them to work together.
I don't care about color, I don't care about having a camera, I don't even care if it's too large to put into my pocket. All I care about is having a PDA-phone that's as good as my ancient Handspring Visorphone.
What's so good about the Visorphone? It's a well-documented general-purpose computing platform that happens to also handle phone calls. You can write programs for it using free, open-source tools, which lowers barriers to entry, and therefore there is a rich selection of software for it, a lot of it free.
Another nice thing about the Visor is being able to input data one-handed using a stylus. It's so much faster than having to push the same button multiple times to toggle through all the possible letters on a 4x3 number pad, or a tiny QWERTY keyboard.
The thing I thought would be useful but hasn't been was the Springboard slot. I never ended up plugging anything in there except the phone. Now, some modules look vaguely useful, but until I can have them *and* a phone active at the same time, I'm not really interested.
Now the venerable Visors are becoming scarcer and scarcer on eBay each time I break one and have to buy a replacement. I'm expecting that I'll have to migrate to something else soon. Between your guys, OpenMoko, or some non-vaporware GreenPhone implementation, I will buy whichever one a) actually works reliably as a phone b) has the most support from third-party developers, especially open source ones and c) has a touch screen sensitive enough for handwriting recognition.
That being said, if the gadget meets the above three deal-breaker criteria, the following would be good bonus features:
* Audio recorder and player
* Media reader
* USB external drive
* Bluetooth
* GPS
* Camera
...in pretty much that order.
Brad --
OK, this might not be *everything* you want, but it's close for now: the VholdR from Twenty20. [I have nothing to do with these guys ... I have, however, seen an operating version at a recent trade show.] Check out http://www.vholdr.com/features.php and esp. the On/Off/Repeat feature which allows you to set a loop time and then, with a push of a button, save a given loop (up to 2 GB) and then continue with your taping ... pretty nifty way to collect "the good stuff" whilst leaving out the garden-variety endos and such. Not auto-download ... sorry. ;-)